The Budget

John Quiggin78 Comments

My AFR piece tomorrow will deal with the expenditure side of the Budget, but I also plan a piece on the tax side. My immediate reaction is the same as everyone else’s – these cuts are amazingly skewed towards upper-income earners, with no-one on less than $55 000 per year getting more than a $300 tax reduction. This is about 9 months worth of bracket creep for someone on $40 000/year, but it’s apparently supposed to last for the rest of this government’s term in office, given the allocation of future tax cuts to the top end.

I’ll try to have a more detailed analysis soon.

There’s more from Ken Parish, Andrew Norton and Flute

The realist case for electoral reform

John Quiggin56 Comments

Via Senator Andrew Bartlett, I see that The Independent is campaigning for electoral reform in the UK, following Labour’s re-election with only 36 per cent of the vote.

Leading opponents within the government are named as John Prescott and Ian McCartney and the story also mentions that Many union leaders also fear it will lead to coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, and prevent Labour from governing again with an absolute majority.

I imagine that the opponents regard themselves as hardheaded realists, but it would be more accurate to view them as reckless gamblers.

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Which martial art are you?

John Quiggin30 Comments

Being focused on martial arts at the moment, I’ve run across quite a few references to boxing, an activity which continues to mystify me. My big question about is: whose idea was it to give boxers gloves? It seems like a recipe for protecting the fists (the bit that hurts most, in my experience) while maximising the potential for brain damage, thereby being simultaneously wimpy and deadly.

I also saw in the UQ News a story about the exclusion of women from boxing, which made the obligatory reference to Million Dollar Baby, a film I haven’t seen yet, though I plan to. It struck me that, of the sports I’ve had any involvement with [not that many, I admit] karate is easily the most gender-integrated. Women and men routinely train together, and, in my experience around 30 per cent of the participants in the average tournament would be women.

I’m not suggesting that non-Western martial arts are some sort of gender-neutral utopia, but the contrast with boxing is still pretty striking.

Monday message board

John Quiggin38 Comments

I’ve been away at the annual Seiyushin karate camp, and have returned to find my broadband connection not working, and my fallback dialup options plagued with difficulties. So you’ll have to provide the content yourselves, just for the moment.

You are invited to post your thoughts on any topic. I’m still planning a May Day post on labour issues, but I’d be interested in your thoughts. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.

Good news on geothermal energy

John Quiggin31 Comments

Geothermal energy is one of those alternative sources that always seems to be waiting in the wings. The basic idea is to exploit the heat (derived from radioactive decay) of granite rocks about 4k below the earth’s surface to superheat water which can then be used to drive a turbine at ground level. It’s a closed cycle so the water can be used over and over. Sounds good, but so have lots of other alternatives to carbon-based fuels that have so far failed to deliver on a large scale.

But now, it seems to be a lot closer The test run by Geodynamics produced 10MW of power and they are talking about a 250 MW plant, with orders already in place from Origin Energy. The Cooper Basin appears to have gigawatts of potential capacity, and large areas of the country are unexplored.

Of course, the big issue is cost. It’s hoped that power can be delivered at 4c/KwH, but it seems likely there will be some overruns. Nevertheless, if the cost of C02 emissions is taken into account, geothermal will very probably be a winner. Once again, it’s evident that, unless we ratify Kyoto now, we are in danger of missing the boat. Australia has a huge endowment of this resource, and a good start on the technology, but no doubt it can be found elsewhere and will be.

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin42 Comments

This regular feature is back again. The idea is that, over the weekend, you should post your thoughts in a more leisurely fashion than in ordinary comments or the Monday Message Board.

Please post your thoughts on any topic, at whatever length seems appropriate to you. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.

Getting back to normal

John Quiggin7 Comments

I’ve been working to restore normal service under WordPress 1.5. Both “recently commented on” and “Live preview” are back.

Meanwhile the good news (touch silicon) is that comment and trackback spam seems to have stopped altogether. The “nofollow” attribute in WordPress makes it pointless, since URLs in comments are not used by Google.

I’m still planning some cosmetic changes, and am happy to take suggestions for plugins.

Meanwhile, I’ve upgraded my Mac to OS 10.4 (Tiger) and am having fun with the new features, and I’ve also done a complete backup, so I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself, at least as far as computing is going.

Update People seem to be having trouble commenting (though it works fine for me), so I’ve turned Live Preview back off for the moment.

More losers than winners

John Quiggin44 Comments

The British people have spoken (or at least voted) and I don’t imagine too many members of the political class are happy with the results. The Labour government got back in, but with less than 40 per cent of the popular vote and a lot more vigour among opponents than supporters, it’s not a great result. In particular, given the weakness of the Opposition, the result is a pretty clear rejection of Tony Blair and his approach to politics.

For the Tories, the outcome is even worse. They only got 33 per cent of the vote, against a combined 60 per cent for Labour and the Lib Dems, parties which have broadly similar centre-left views. Barring a cataclysmic change in the electoral landscape, there’s no serious prospect that they can win in five years time.

The Lib Dems did better than most expected, but still failed to break out of third party status, even with the Iraq issue going for them. Their best hope is that Labour’s position will weaken to the point where they are forced into democratic reform of the electoral system, either PR or preferential voting.
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